Black Patriot’s Techdirt Comments

Re:

lol, we might be building a national broadband network, but it's going to take so long to build that it'll be out of date. Realistically it's already out of date, as the NBN is only designed to have speeds of around 100 Mbit, whereas other countries have Gigabit internet connections available.

The best way to respond to wild accusations and attempts at fear mongering is a polite and reasonable response, that way it's harder for them to claim you're trying to "destroy our values", or whatever ASCAP was trying to make up.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

I don't think he does either. All the filmmakers want is an exception so that they can use clips for their films. Provided the film is actually fair use then there should be no problem. That's the key, if it's fair use then there's no issue, if it's not fair use then it's infringement, but in either case the DMCA shouldn't be involved.

I think the ideal system is where the government owns the infrastructure and all the ISPs simply compete on distributing information over it. That causes competition between ISPs, keeping prices low and speeds high, and the government can fund investment into the speed and reach of the network, perhaps with help from the ISPs, like some sort of mandatory fee per user (like $5 a month or something).

What the US government should do is buy all the fiber networks in metro areas and allow the local ISPs to use them. Then use the revenue from the metro areas to expand outwards into the regional areas, and develop new technology to increase the range. Not everyone needs a fiber connection to their house, we could use fiber to the center of a town then use wireless to connect the last mile to the consumers.

Of course this all assumes that the US government can be trusted to run such a service without screwing everyone over, which doesn't make me too optimistic about the future.

For the record, I live in Australia and we have a similar system to New Zealand, with one slight difference, no one seems to be interested in keeping Telstra (the company that owns most of the phone lines in the whole country) competitive. We made the mistake of privatizing the infrastructure itself, not just the company we'd created to run it, which has cause a huge number of problems since.

And caps aren't as bad as they seem, my connection is about 5Mbps with a 30GB cap (it's actually 30GB peak, 30GB off-peak and 30GB uploads). We also have arrangements with other ISPs to share bandwidth and content, so I have unmetered access (doesn't count towards my cap) to a large number of file mirrors and other sites, even things like the steam library are unmetered, and some ISPs have unmetered downlaods from Xbox Live. All you'd really in the US is a local mirror for Netflix content, Xbox Live and Steam and most people wouldn't come near their caps.

As long as there is a demand for a good there will be someone willing to supply it. That's the reason you can't get rid of a black market, not completely, unless you offer the goods that people want in a way they want. That's the main reason the war on drugs isn't working, you can't defeat the invisible hand.

@ Wesha
There are also apps for the iPhone that can do blacklists. Also, you're phone doesn't have 8GB of RAM, it has 8GB of storage, and you might want to check to see if it's saving your texts on the phone's internal memory or if its saving it to an SD card.

I swear the politicians here in Australia aren't even listening to ANY of their constituents, because everyone has been complaining about their new censorship laws and they still seem to be going through with them. About the only good thing is there should be an election around the end of this year, so maybe we'll be able to send a message with our votes (I'm not holding my breath).